'Don,' an acquaintance of
mine said recently, T don't mean to question your commitment to
the principles of antivivisection, but you were a vivisector for
sixteen years. What caused such a quick and radical change in your
beliefs?' I have been asked the same question many times, and by
one person more than any other . . . myself. The answer has
changed as my values have changed, but consistently and in the
same direction. Let's take a chronological look at the evolution
of my values in order to try to understand.

In early 1941, just a few
months before my fifth birthday, my parents somehow managed to buy
a 20-acre farm in Southern California. They had migrated with
their two young sons from the rural south, where they themselves
had quit school early to help support their families by labouring
in the fields for as little as 20 cents per day. They neither
liked nor understood city life, and our move to our own land
promised security with independence.

The land fed us and
clothed us. We grew our own fruit and vegetables and a surplus
which we sold from door to door for maximum profit, as the large
packers and buyers paid poorly for the products of small
independent growers.

Animals were integral to
our existence. We raised pigs, cattle and chickens for our meat,
eggs and dairy products, churned our own butter and drank our milk
as it came from the cow, without pasteurization or homogenization.
We treated our animals with love and respect, but always in the
knowledge that they were on earth not for themselves but to serve
us. Butchering was accomplished as expediently as possible with a
hatchet and a chopping block for the fowl and a well-placed bullet
for the larger animals. Their deaths raised enigmatic questions in
my mind but were soon accepted as necessary, for that was the
ethos of the farm.

When I was about seven
years old (and my brother nine), our father bought us a burro. We
had wanted a horse for some time but had been convinced that a
horse was economically unjustifiable, as it would contribute
nothing but pleasure to the family farm. We had a tractor with
huge metal wheels, almost an antique, so we couldn't even use a
horse for ploughing. We soon learned that our burro was not to be
simply a plaything for us. As my father pruned the branches of the
fruit trees or cut down the corn stalks from the field, my brother
and I loaded them on the cart and hauled them away from the field
or orchard. There is much hauling to be done on a farm, and before
we knew it we were performing this essential function daily. Even
so, the burro and I became close friends and we spent many
blissful hours exploring the surrounding countryside together.

While the burro and the
other farm animals were pressed into our service, there were many
other animals on our farm which were undomesticated and posed a
threat to our way of life. Gophers and ground squirrels burrowed
in the soft soil of the orchards, eating our vegetables and the
roots of our trees. We irrigated our fields at night to minimize
loss of water through evaporation. The water came from a single
source and had to be channelled into irrigation ditches dug by
hand or with a plough. These ditches followed a rather circuitous
path in order to accommodate gravity and the many plants that
required frequent irrigation. If a gopher should happen to burrow
near an irrigation ditch, we had to fill the burrow with rocks and
soil, for it's amazing how much water can disappear into a gopher
hole. Skunks, while posing no immediate physical threat, were a
constant nuisance; other creatures of the wild, such as
rattlesnakes, weasels or coyotes, were seen as encroachers and
potential enemies to our chickens and our egg supply. I received
25 cents for each ground squirrel I trapped or shot, and 10 cents
for each gopher. I therefore learned early to kill without guilt,
for wasn't I doing something to help the family?

After several years our
family moved to Colorado and the life on the farm was over for
ever. But now I was taken hunting and fishing, and I became
proficient in both. We considered ourselves, 'good sportsmen', and
I suppose we were in the sense that we always ate what we killed,
never exceeded our limit, were conscious of camping etiquette,
were careful with firearms when there were other people around and
so on. To us, it was a perfectly acceptable way of life, even
though we could have done without the meat provided by these
activities.

In 1960, while studying
for a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and ever mindful of the ethics
involved in working with psychiatric patients, I was given a
position as graduate teaching assistant at the Ohio State
University. My job was to teach principles of learning to
second-year college students through the use of
operant-conditioning techniques applied to laboratory rats. This
was no problem for me, given that my entire background consisted
of using other animals for my sake, and I glibly demonstrated the
effectiveness of various techniques of training, including the use
of electric shock as 'negative reinforcement'.

Six years later, having
completed my internship and graduated from the US Air Force
Officers Training School, I was assigned to head up the laboratory
when the Air Force decided to develop a capability to determine
the effects of pulsed ionizing radiation upon the behaviour of
non-human primates. (To the Department of Defense, a psychologist
is a psychologist: it didn't matter that I was a clinical
psychologist.) I was given a relatively large budget ($200,000 to
$300,000 per year) and freedom to set up the programme I wanted. I
had a crew of enlisted and civilian workers, most of them with
college degrees. I was given the opportunity to travel to other
laboratories, to speak to funding agencies, to consult with other
scientists.

Realizing that the
vocabulary of the clinical psychologist was inappropriate for the
job, I immediately set about learning something about experimental
psychology. I instituted a contractual arrangement with the
Department of Psychology, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. Baylor
University was to train monkeys at their primate facility in Waco
and, further, to provide two or three graduate students to work as
'interns' at the School of Aerospace Medicine under my direction.
I learned from these students and from their professors.

The gastro-intestinal
system is affected early in the course of radiation injury. Hence
we were not at liberty to use food, or 'positive reinforcement' to
train the monkeys, for if they stopped 'working' we could not
attribute the work stoppage to their inability to work. The
animals might simply not feel like eating. We were therefore
constrained to use shock avoidance, or 'negative reinforcement',
in our experiments. We felt that we must provide the animals with
the strongest incentive in order to avoid interpretational
difficulties based upon 'motivation'. We therefore bought
specially designed shock units from Behavioral Research Systems
Electronics. These shock units delivered between 0 and 50
millamperes at 12,000 volts. The output from the shock units was
connected to 'shock plates', metal plates under the monkeys' feet
and mounted on strong springs to ensure contact with the feet. It
was impossible to measure the amount of shock each animal received
as skin toughness, perspiration, spring tension, the specific
shock unit, etc., were all relatively uncontrolled. The training
situation therefore became totally empirical in that the shock
unit was turned up until the primate began to respond. In many
cases this was a very high shock level, as most of the monkeys
were very young and passive and tended to withdraw rather than to
strike out when hurt. The more aggressive animals received fewer
shocks because they responded more often and were therefore more
likely to emit the response desired by the experimenter, at which
point the shock would be terminated. But woe to the monkey who
withdrew, who began to self-mutilate, who tried to escape: I've
seen more than one monkey die from cardiac fibrillation occasioned
by repeated shocking.

There are two obvious
questions which must be addressed at this point: how could anyone
do such things to animals? And why would anyone do those things in
the first place? Realizing full well that I will probably never be
able to answer these questions to anyone's satisfaction, I'll
attempt to reflect my thoughts during the time I was involved in
such research.

First, why wouldn't
I use other animals for my own means? I represented a classic
example of what I choose to call 'conditioned ethical blindness'.
My entire life had consisted of being rewarded for using animals,
treating them as sources of human improvement or amusement. There
had not been a single person with the temerity to challenge my
behaviour towards other animals. Of course I was kind to animals;
of course I loved my pets; of course I would tend to a sick bird,
rabbit, dog or cat without question. On the other hand, I would
belie my tenderness a moment later by eating a chicken, or a
rabbit or a squirrel, or part of a steer. That was different in my
mind; that was 'meat'. The word 'meat' is a means of distancing
ourselves from the animals we eat, just as 'negative
reinforcement' is a means of distancing ourselves from
electrically shocking a creature who feels pain as much as, if not
more than, we humans do. I returned to graduate school at the Ohio
State University in 1971-72 for a year's study of experimental
psychology. At first I spoke openly of the work I had been doing,
but I sensed discomfort among my fellow students and some of the
professors. They didn't say anything- I simply felt their
discomfort. I stopped talking about my work. I studied with an
ethologist from Britain, with physiological psychologists,
learning psychologists, motivational psychologists and social
psychologists from the United States and with graduate students
from all walks of life. Never was the ethical question broached.
The compartmentalization was incredible (now that I look back on
it). We'd be discussing on the one hand the effects of early
stimulation upon later development, on the other the effects of
brain lesions upon visual behaviour. The whole gamut of research
was implicitly defined as ethical. There was never any question.
Why shouldn 't I have engaged in such research?

But let's take this
conditioning process a step further. During my tenure as a
psychologist I considered Harry Harlow a super-person. Dr Harlow,
perhaps the best-known of all experimental psychologists, was
responsible for conceptualizing the surrogate-mother concept in
raising rhesus monkeys. He learned that if one separates an infant
monkey from his or her mother, the monkey will probably grow up to
be neurotic. Going beyond this simple truth, Dr Harlow did all
manner of things to infant monkeys. Not only did he separate them
from their mothers, but he also put them in 'pits of despair',
where the animals never saw, heard, smelled or in any other way
sensed another life. These monkeys became psychotic, as one might
suspect if one were to give it a moment's thought . . . which I
didn't. Harry Harlow created a 'monster mother' a mechanical
device which threatened the infants with all kinds of harm. It is
scarcely surprising that the monkeys turned out to be more fearful
than their normally raised peers. The bulk of this research was
paid for by the American public under the auspices of the National
Institutes of Mental Health.

Dr Harry Harlow is not the
only person to have carried out this type of research. Others
continue to do it. The justification? To develop a model of
psychopathology to be applied in work with humans. It is very
difficult for me to understand why I did not question the validity
of this research twenty years ago. As a practising clinical
psychologist, I would never consider going to the literature on
non-human animals to try to find a model for a client.

The work simply has no
utility. This is another example of 'conditioned ethical
blindness', although one does not even have to face the ethical
issue to see the fallacies in such research.

We are now ready to
examine the second question I raised above: why would anyone do
the kinds of experiments I did? I was, of course, given a reason
for this research. I was told that the Air Force needed to know
the survivability/vulnerability of its weapons systems. In other
words, it needed to know where the systems were weakest so that it
could bolster up that part of the system. Much research had been
accomplished to 'harden' the electronics against the effects of
radiation, but the human was also a basic component of most Air
Force weapons systems (i.e., airplanes). Hence, it was argued, the
vulnerability of the human 'subsystem' demanded definition.

It became my job to
determine probability estimates of aircrew functioning following
nuclear radiation. If the pilot (co-pilot, bombardier, etc.)
became comatose following the receipt of 5,000 rads, why spend an
exorbitant amount of time and money 'hardening' the electronic
components to withstand 10,000, 15,000 or 20,000 rads? Also, if
the human simply underwent a period of 'early transient
incapacitation' and could operate the weapons system fifteen or
twenty minutes after irradiation, how could we develop an
automatic pilot which would get the crew member through this
period of incapacitation and still enable him (sexist but
accurate) to complete his mission?

These are real questions
to the military planner; as an employee of the Department of
Defense, they became real problems for me. I'm sure that I don't
have to point to the lack of humane consideration inherent in this
situation. In contrast to most biomedical research, even the human
is seen as expendable to the mission; the goal is to assure that
the mission is completed, that the bombs are dropped. No one
expects the human operators of these weapons systems to return
from their missions. What possible chance of personal
consideration does a non-human have in such an environment?

The obvious solution: take
the human out of the weapons system. Even though the technology to
do exactly that has existed for a decade, it will not be done.
Why? Because the future of the US Air Force depends upon having a
person in the cockpit. The US Air Force is an entrenched
bureaucratic institution. It is self-perpetuating and has erected
defence mechanisms to prevent its own annihilation while
developing other defensive strategies to defend the United States
against invasion; both systems are sophisticated and 'hardened'
against attack. In order to protect the status quo, projects which
maintain it are approved; those which threaten its continuation
are disapproved. If we can't take the human out of the system, we
must find a way to ensure that the system works with the human in
it. Hence, billions of dollars are spent on justifying the
existing bureaucratic apparatus.

In this role, I accepted
the problems as my superiors outlined them for me. How, indeed,
does one determine the vulnerability of the human operator to
radiation?

First, one must accept an
anthropocentric point of view - that is, human welfare is the
first priority. Second, one must, at least implicitly (as in my
case), assume that the ends justify the means. There is no
substitute for humans in biomedical research designed to learn
about humans, but one cannot accept this fact if convinced that
the problem must be solved. So a surrogate must be found for those
experiments which would prove harmful to humans. The non-human
primate would appear to be our closest relative; he is the obvious
choice.

If there were an
extrapolative index, a formula for predicting human behaviour from
the behaviour of non-human primates, biomedical science would have
a wealth of information. Many of the 'problems' presented to me
would have been solved years and years ago, for millions of
non-human primates have been sacrificed to this end. There is no
such formula. But I didn't realize this simple fact and, being
convinced that non-human animals exist for human purposes, blindly
accepted the premise that 'close is better than nothing' and set
about developing an ambitious programme to irradiate trained
monkeys in order to extrapolate the results to hypothetical human
situations. Over 1,000 monkeys later, several events occurred
which caused me to step back and re-evaluate my position. Although
I cannot point to a single causative factor in my conversion from
experimenter to animal rights activist, I can recall some of the
events.

I must confess that, for
some years, I had entertained suspicions about the utility of the
data we were gathering. I made a few token attempts to ascertain
both the destination and the purpose of the technical reports we
published but now acknowledge my eagerness to accept assurances
from those in command that we were, in fact, providing a real
service to the US Air Force and, hence, to the defence of the free
world. I used those assurances as blinkers to avoid the reality of
what I saw in the field, and even though I did not always wear
them comfortably, they did serve to protect me from the
insecurities associated with the potential loss of status and
income.

As each day passes it
becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend how I was able to
close my eyes to the artificiality of the research I was doing.
The data we gathered on the behavioural effects of ionizing
radiation were used as inputs to 'models' of the operational
systems. By this stage the numbers themselves had become 'truths'.
The fact that they had been obtained from non-human primates in
highly artificial situations was forgotten or ignored. The very
fact that they existed to be utilized as inputs to
computer-modelled 'war games'justified their validity.

And then, one day, the
blinkers slipped off, and I found myself in a very serious
confrontation with Dr Roy DeHart, Commander, US Air Force School
of Aerospace Medicine. I tried to point out that, given a nuclear
confrontation, it is highly unlikely that operational commanders
will go to charts and figures based upon data from the rhesus
monkey to gain estimates of probable force strength or
second-strike capability. Dr DeHart insisted that the data will be
invaluable, asserting, 'They don't know the data are based on
animal studies.' Needless to say, this confrontation proved
devastating to my status as a Principal Investigator at the School
of Aerospace Medicine!

In retrospect, I realize
that the slow changes in my perception of the research I was doing
were accompanied by changes on the empathic, as well as on the
intellectual, level. For example, on several occasions during the
sixteen years I did research on non-human primates, I took it upon
myself to destroy irradiated animals. Although not trained as a
physiologist, I found I had the facility to locate a vein while
many technicians could not. Rather than cause the monkey further
suffering, I began to fill in when the veterinarian was absent. On
each occasion a thought occurred to me: 'Do I have the "right" to
do this?' I know now that a subliminal voice answered 'No!' but I
felt I had no choice. At that particular moment I did not; later
it was easy to concentrate on other issues.

In 1979, just over a year
before I would leave the laboratory to work for the dignity of
non-human animals, my boss approached me with a request: would I
talk to a young statistician who had just come into our
laboratories to work with us? He had apparently become quite upset
upon seeing the monkeys receive electric shock for failing to
perform their 'duties' correctly and had commented on the
inhumanity of the project. Could I defuse this potentially
dangerous situation? Of course! I gave this fellow all the trite
arguments. I told him of the 'necessity' for the research; I told
him of the reason for using electric shock; I told him why we had
to use monkeys. He bought the argument; in the process I began to
unconvince myself.

Shortly thereafter I was
ordered to radiate four trained rhesus monkeys with 360 rads of
gamma radiation and to determine the effect of such radiation upon
the monkeys' behaviour over the next ten hours. I objected to
doing this experiment for the following reasons. First, I had
become an expert on the behavioural effects of ionizing radiation
in the rhesus monkey; I knew that 360 rads would not affect the
performance of the monkeys during the ten hour post-irradiation
observation period. Second, with even the most elegant of
experimental designs, a subject population of four is
statistically inadequate; even if all four monkeys behaved in
exactly the same way following radiation, the results would be
scientifically invalid. Third, I had fallen out of favour with my
superiors by this time as a result of my questioning of the entire
project and had been relegated to the laboratory. I knew
these monkeys. I was becoming more and more particular about how
they were 'utilized'. I didn't want to 'use' these animals in a
meaningless project. This is not to say that I would have balked
at using them in a project I considered to be important; I had not
yet reached that point in my conversion. I took my objections to a
staff meeting and presented my position.

The other professionals,
including my immediate supervisor, agreed that the experiment
would be a negative one; the monkeys would demonstrate no
behavioural changes during the 10—hour post-irradiation
observation period. They further agreed that the experiment could
be done by analysis of existing data, by a thorough literature
review. Even so, my immediate superior was frightened to authorize
this procedure and would not do so. He did, however, promise to
discuss the matter with his supervisor.

The farther one goes up
the chain of command, the less competent technical advice is
available, states the Peter Principle. This was no exception; I
was ordered to accomplish the experiment for political reasons. My
reaction was anything but acquiescence; steps were subsequently
taken to get rid of me, as I had become a thorn in the side of the
bureaucracy. I was fired.

As I reflect upon this
situation, I see that values based upon an unpopular ethic are a
luxury that many people cannot afford to conceptualize, let alone
to embrace. I was being stirred by some disquieting thoughts and
feelings, to be sure, but I didn't understand them. As far as I
was concerned, I was caught up in a bureaucratic morass, being
punished for questioning authority, feeling self-righteous because
I knew that it was scientifically improper to waste valuable
resources (animals) in the pursuit of poor science. Whatever
empathy existed with the laboratory animals was still in its own
cage, locked away from my thoughts.

I was hurt, embarrassed
and angry. I looked for ammunition, for tools of retribution. I
called in the Inspector General, alleging mismanagement and waste
of government resources. I filed for reinstatement with the proper
authorities. I talked to the press. I wrote to humane
organizations and, in the process of composing these letters,
began to realize, perhaps for the first time, that my work and the
research efforts of my peers had been both inhumane and without
redeeming value.

As a biomedical research
scientist, I had been shielded almost completely from contact with
organizations within the animal advocacy movement. It wasn't so
much that I had been ordered not to communicate with individuals
or organizations concerned with the rights of laboratory animals,
but a bias against any antivivi-section philosophy was a 'natural'
part of the laboratory environment. During my sixteen years in the
laboratory the morality and ethics of using laboratory animals
were never broached in either formal or informal meetings prior to
my raising the issues during the waning days of my tenure as a
vivisector. On at least two occasions support personnel were
chastised for unnecessary abuse of their non-human charges, but
the question of the cruelty of the research itself remained buried
in the all-encompassing and 'beneficent' embrace of medical
science.

In my anger and
frustration, I had a flash of insight. The research I had been
doing, and which was continuing in my absence, was not merely
scientifically improper: it was inhumane. I was appalled at my own
past insensitivity and determined to put a stop to those projects
which I knew to be both invalid and cruel, but I had no idea who
to contact. Like so many other people, I had not taken the time or
made the effort to become informed about the plight of non-human
animals. Two groups came to mind from distant memories: the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) and the
Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). I wrote to the latter
organization, and my letter was referred to Dr Andrew Rowan, who
replied with interest and recommended that I contact Dr Shirley
McGreal of the International Primate Protection League (IPPL). I
did so, and a lively correspondence grew up between myself and Dr
McGreal - a correspondence which would eventually lead me into the
humane movement.

I won my case for
reinstatement and returned to the School of Aerospace Medicine,
not to work with animals, for I could no longer do that, but to do
research on alternatives to the use of animals. After three months
I recommended that the research be terminated. This was not
accepted, and I was ordered back to the laboratory. I resigned my
position and found employment in the humane movement.

My values are very
different today from what they were in 1980. In retrospect, I
realize that I held tightly to my conditioned beliefs, releasing
them only as they were pried from me by logic and evidence of
their inappropriateness. In 1980 I could be pressed to separate
research with non-human animals into 'better' or 'poorer'
categories. The residual logic of'necessary medical research'
remained to some extent; the anthropocentric view faded slowly
away, to be replaced by a broader view of increased respect for
other life forms. As a consequence, meat was omitted from my diet,
leather from my wardrobe and rodeos and circuses from my options
for entertainment. My feelings at the sight of a fur coat changed
from grudging admiration to nonchalance, to pity, to disgust and
frustration.

Change requires the
reconceptualization of many, if not all, of our habits. I didn't
change my views quickly, nor did I change them without struggle or
resentment. I only hope that in changing my own views I have
become able to bring about similar changes in the views of those
who unthinkingly continue to experiment today.